More frills than thrills by the sea

ONE of the mysteries of Sculpture by the Sea is the number of visitors who walk around armed with cameras, snapping every second object they see.

Sculpture by the Sea

ONE of the mysteries of Sculpture by the Sea is the number of visitors who walk around armed with cameras, snapping every second object they see. Do they really want to savour these works at leisure once they get back home? Or is taking a picture rather a way of deferring the real act of looking? A thing strikes us as vaguely interesting, but instead of making the effort of engagement and attention, we take a picture and that uncomfortable feeling goes away.

The snapping is particularly conspicuous with the more trivial and gimmicky pieces, and as I observed the behaviour of the crowd this year it struck me that the quality of work was almost always inversely proportional to the interest of the punters. Backpackers lined up to be photographed under the most conspicuously kitsch work in the show, a giant tap set -- "can you take my picture under that faucet?" asked one American voice. Teenage girls squealed "cool" and "awesome" as they ran to have themselves snapped in the circle of red figures by Wang Shugang; Japanese tourists grinned and made V-signs in front of various horrible stainless steel confections, often indeed made by Japanese artists.

The other curious thing is that the works arrayed along the beautiful coastal path tend to be the least serious, whereas the more heavy-duty and ambitious things are clustered in the central space. Site-specificity thus also, in practice, tends to have a negative correlation with quality, although there are plenty of indifferent works in the central space, too.

Most of the sculptures in the show, in fact, are aesthetically insignificant. They tend to fall into two broad categories. The first encompasses uninspired, academic repetitions of the cliches of postwar sculpture and the highly commercial versions of this sort of thing, in which the Japanese are over-represented and the media tend to be glassy stainless steel or machine-polished granite -- both materials more at home in kitchens than in art. Almost nothing is more flesh-creepingly awful than combinations of stainless steel and rusted steel, or of polished and unpolished granite.

The second category of bad sculptures is the gimmicky and the kitsch, with a few half-baked conceptual pieces thrown in. The tap set takes the prize, of course, but there are countless other examples, even Ken Unsworth's skeleton on a ladder, not to mention herds of zebras, cane toads, and so on -- all great favourites with the snappers. A few works have higher ambitions, and an even smaller number succeed. It is good to see that someone is trying to do something with the human figure, but deeply depressing to see how far Ante Dabro's Velocity goes wrong in its absurdly twisted posture. The whole basis of a figure sculpture is its ability to stand; the fundamental logic of weight and balance cannot be ignored. It is the failure to understand this basic principle that makes all those sculptures of cricketers and footballers you see around sporting stadiums so laughably incompetent.

The dynamics of the figure are carried over to a large extent into abstract sculpture (interestingly, as I have observed before, abstraction is more successful in sculpture than in painting, because a sculptor is not making a picture of nothing, but actually making a thing).

Among the distinguished works in this year's exhibition is one by Ron Robertson-Swann, which rather suggests an altar surrounded by screens. But importantly, the work has a strong sense of grounding and at the same time is conceived in volume, in three dimensions. In contrast, many of the other abstract works, even when they are technically three-dimensional and superficially animated, demonstrate little ability to think volumetrically.

There is a large and rather imposing work by Anthony Caro, and other respectable works by Clara Hali, James Rogers (though he has a more elegantly resolved piece in the small sculpture section) and Paul Selwood, who won the Balnaves Foundation Prize. Once again Linda Bowden stands out with a remarkable piece that is, unlike so much else here, all substance and no frills. Bowden has an uncanny feel for the magnetism that draws forms together or pushes them apart, all the more metaphorically effective for resisting specific interpretation.

Most impressive of all, though, is once again David Horton, who remained unaccountably unrewarded with a prize. Horton's Three Madrigals stood out not only from the general mediocrity, but even from the few artists who can be considered his peers. He demonstrates a powerful and quintessentially sculptural intelligence in his understanding of the tension between stasis and dynamism, and his complex themes and variations of form unfold in a real and tangible space. Unlike most of the artists here, Horton can actually think of more than one thing at a time.

VISUAL ART
Sculpture by the Sea. Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk, Sydney.

Until November 20.